Digital lighting technologies, i.e. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications. Some of the fixtures embodying these sources feature a lighting module, including one or more LEDs capable of producing different colors, e.g. red, green, and blue, as well as a processor for independently controlling the output of the LEDs in order to generate a variety of colors and color-changing lighting effects, for example, as discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,016,038 and 6,211,626. These fixtures can also be configured to integrate illumination with data manipulation and transmission functions, for example, as discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,548,967, incorporated herein by reference.
Many lighting fixtures have been designed that implement LEDs in order to achieve energy savings. Lighting fixtures have also been designed that additionally or alternatively implement intelligent lighting control system in order to achieve energy savings. For example, some street lighting fixtures include a daylight sensor and a motion detector and are wirelessly linked with other in-range street lighting fixtures. Each street lighting fixture only illuminates when the ambient light level as measured by the daylight sensor thereof is below a certain level and either (1) motion has been detected or (2) a wireless signal from a neighboring street lighting fixture indicates motion has been detected by the motion detector of the neighboring street lighting fixture. When an object is detected by the motion detector of the neighboring street lighting fixture the wireless signal it sends out causes all street lighting fixtures that are in-range of the neighboring street lighting fixture to be illuminated. Thus, the same number of neighboring street lighting fixtures will be illuminated regardless of the actual path of the detected object. In the case of a road with a median having street lighting fixtures on each side of the median, this may cause certain in-range street lighting fixtures on a side of the median opposite the object to be unnecessarily illuminated. In the case of a curvy road, this may cause certain street lighting fixtures that are a short time of flight distance away from an object, but a long distance away along the actual path of the object, to be unnecessarily illuminated. The relationship between lighting fixtures in such systems is based on distance therebetween and is not dynamically determined by, for example, their relationship to one another along one or more normal paths of activity.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an intelligent control system for an object-sensing network, which includes one or more lighting fixtures capable of dynamically determining a relationship to a plurality of other lighting fixtures.